As someone who has worked in ABA Therapy in Miami (Applied Behavior Analysis) field for many years, I know that therapy is only sufficient when there is parent collaboration. The child spends more time with the parent, so they have more opportunities to follow through with different things. As said in most articles, research has shown that the more parent involvement, the more positive outcome across a variety of clients. Communicating with those working with your child is a MUST when it comes to parent collaboration! Frequent parent trainings can really help, so therapists could show parents how we are running goals. At Progressive, therapists encourage parents to ask as many questions has possible, so we can all be on the same page.
Now, obviously, ABA comes with many uncommon words that you might not hear every day. A commonly used word from your therapists should be “reinforcement” which is a procedure used to increase the likelihood of that behavior in the future. For example, we would reinforce when your child is not engaging in the behavior that we are trying to decrease, in order to decrease the likelihood of it continuing. A common mistake when reinforcing behavior, even therapists tend to make it, would be not reinforcing a behavior quick enough. When rewarding a behavior, you have about 2 seconds to deliver the reinforcer. For example, if a child uses the bathroom you would reinforce as soon as he/or she finishes. If you walk to the kitchen to get a cookie, then you would be reinforcing something completely different.